Prince Myshkin

I think I know who you mean. (edited my mistake in the previous post - congrats on actually making sense of it)

:laugh3: I need to watch that program again this Summer. It's been so long.

Bias Whatever your opinion on Barrack Obama, it isn't hard to find somebody who disagrees. A recent poll in the US found that he is the most divisive president since the 1950's: 81% of Democrats think he's doing a good job but only 13% of opposing Republicans agree. How can so many people make a judgement about the same person and come to such different conclusions? The obvious explanation is that they are biased - by their political affiliations, by the media, by their friends and family and much else. The obvious explanation is correct. But who, precisely is biased? It depends who you ask. Those who approve of Obama think the conservatives, and their media, are the biased ones. Those who don't think it's the liberals. In fact, they are both right. As any psychologist will tell you, pretty much everything you think and do is coloured by biases that you are typically totally unaware of. Rather than seeing the world as it is, you see it through a veil of prejudice and self serving hypocrisies. To get a handle on this, think about your opinion on Obama (could be difficult for non-Americans but this is the example it gives). You probably believe your view to be an honest and objective assessment based on a range of evidence from both sides. Perhaps you'll grudgingly acknowledge that you feel the way you do because you are liberal/conservative, but then reassure yourself that being liberal/conservative is the only rational choice, so that's OK. You have just experienced the illusion of naive realism - the conviction that you, and perhaps you alone, perceive the world as it really is, and that anybody who views it differently is biased. This conviction is inescapable and deep. If at this point you are thinking 'Yeah, right, that may be true of other people, but not me', then you have fallen foul of yet another aspect of the illusion: the bias blind spot. Most people will happily acknowledge that such biases exist, but only in other people. Our biases are formed and solidified in our childhood and early adulthood, operating below the radar in our subconscious. It is not that people do not look inwards to question their own judgements and beliefs. Many do. But their biases are not consciously available for inspection, so they leap to the conclusion that their beliefs are correct and based on rational reasoning. Many of the biases are a harmless variant of the positive illusions we routinely entertain in order to shelter our fragile egos from reality, such as a tendency to take credit for successes but deny responsibility for failure. Others are more serious. Few people believe that they are sexist/racist, and that their views are honestly held, but there is always a bias within you and you judge people on their potential based on a long list of things, including their sex and race. While opinions are obviously ripe for bias, facts are also at its mercy, with people adept at interpreting the world to fit with their existing beliefs. For example, environmentalists interpret the fact that most scientists and governments are convinced that humans are ever changing the climate as open-and-shut evidence, but sceptics just see a conspiracy. No amount of new evidence will change their minds and yet, on the whole, both believe their views are unbiased and rational. Similarly we seek out information that fits with our beliefs and ignore or dismiss information that doesn't. This 'confirmation bias' has been shown time and time again, for example in experiments in which people are asked to read a range of evidence about a contentious topic such as capital punishment. Even when exposed to arguments on both sides, most people interpret the evidence in a self-serving way, accepting the data which supports their view and dismissing or ignoring the rest. The scary thing is that they are unaware of dong it. Similarly, confronting people with new information that contradicts their beliefs more often than not ends up hardening their position. Sadly, even though knowing you are biased doesn't necessarily help. In any given instance you are not likely to be aware of it.

Yeah they are shit now. I like the first albums rawness. The second one is more produced but in a good way, and just as biting so it sits alongside the first in terms of greatness in my opinion. After that it was mainly the singles for third album and the rest of their work is wank from what I've heard.

I'll give you a brief summary then... There are five sections, and each will take quite a while to condense so I'll do them one at once. Some are more interesting than others. Should take me the whole day to get them down I'm afraid. Visual Every five seconds you blink, and unless you think about it you don't notice the blackouts because your brain edits them out. Even when your eyes are open they're only taking in a fraction of the visual information that is available. In the centre of your retina is a dense patch of photoreceptor cells about one millimetre across called the fovea. It's the visual systems sweet spot and it's where perception of detail and colour are at its best. When you move away from this section of the eye, visual activity falls away really quickly and colour vision disappears. Ten degrees to the side of the forvea, visual activity is at 20% of the maximum. This means you can only capture a tiny percentage of the visual field in full colour and detail at any one time. Yet vision does not feel like this: it feels like a movie. This is because your eyes are constantly flitting over the visual scene, fixing on one spot for a fraction of a second and then moving on. These jerky eye movements are known as saccades and they happen about three times a second and last up to 200 milliseconds. With each fixation your visual system grabs a bite of high resolution detail which it somehow weaves together to create an illusion of completeness, which is crazy because during saccades you are effectively blind as your brain stops processing what your eyes take in for around 100 milliseconds. For example if you look into a mirror and focus on one eye, then the next, you won't see your eyes move. Not because it is too fast (as you can see other peoples eyes dart) but because your brain isn't taking in that information. Given that you perform 150,000 saccades, that means your visual system is offline for 4 hours of your waking day, without even taking blinking into account. We don't notice anything amiss though. The way your brain weaves such fragmentary information into the smooth technicolour movie that we experience as reality remains a mystery. One leading idea is that it makes a prediction and then uses the foveal "spotlight" to verify it. We create something internally and then we check, check, check. Essentially we experience the brains best guess about what is happening now. This means the visual system has to predict the future. Information striking the fovea cannot be relayed instantaneously to conscious perception: first it has to travel down the optic nerve and then be processed by the brain. This takes several hundred milliseconds, by which time the world has moved on. And so the brain makes a prediction about what the world will look like in 200 milliseconds time and that is what you see. Without this future projection you would be unable to catch a ball, dodge moving objects or walk around without crashing into things. There's another huge hole in the visual system which can make you oblivious to things which should be unmissable. The jerky movements that shift your fovea around the visual scene don't happen at random - they are directed by your brains attentional system. Sometimes you consciously decide on what to focus on, such as when you read. At other times your attention is grabbed by a movement in your peripheral vision or an unexpected noise. Attention is a limited resource, and for reasons unknown most people are unable to keep track of four or five moving objects at once, which can therefore lead to your visual system becoming oblivious to things that are staring you in the face. A famous demonstration of this 'inattention blindness' is the invisible gorilla, a video based experiment in which viewers are asked to pay close attention to a specific aspect of a basketball game. Around half of the viewers completely fail to spot a person in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the screen, beat their chest and walk off again.

Bunch of midgets...

Have you given the first album a try?

It wasn't really put up seriously. Note my contribution before the article within the stars.

I also don't think people need to made to feel any more anger towards authority figures given the current climate, and anger would be a likely, and also legitimate response to this, in my eyes at least.

I would say it comes from within. That's how I lost my weight. Forcing people into it and victimising them can work in some cases, but it can also have very detrimental effects and I personally feel that the negative results not only outweigh the positive ones on a moral level, but also probably would on a numerical level.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13397306

My grey streak is coming to prominence and isn't totally underneath any more. It's only small though. I find it quite exciting.

Wow, I made an error in my grammar, well done. You understood what I meant. I still have no idea why that smiley was there in your post though (and that's why it was legitimate to bring up) - does anybody else understand why it was used by the way? Either answer or quit trolling, Mark. You're already teetering from what I gather.

Well the first one said that it was human nature for us to believe in a God. Children under five are also more likely to believe in some people having 'superhuman properties' as they aren't aware of certain limitations. This was one of the main things it discovered: It then goes on to say that people who try to suppress religion won't succeed because our thought is rooted in religious concepts. I disagreed with this to an extent, because whilst children do believe these things, it does not mean adults have to believe them. It helps us understand why many adults do, and I'm not saying they are wrong (though personally I don't believe it - the nature of organised religion is where I take issue, as people know), but they say themselves that children believe that their Mothers are omnipresent until they develop their thinking. It isn't ridiculous to believe that we may one day get to the stage where people develop even further, in the future, and there is a general consensus that there isn't a God as organised religions portray 'him'. The second article was about the American army, where Atheists have requested counselling that isn't based around religion in order to help them on a spiritual level, such as philosophical thinking. Just things to help them organise their thoughts, put things into perspective and deal with the trauma's they may see. This has generally been ridiculed by some of the Chaplains of different faiths.

Oooooh, I thought it was more a situation where you weren't ready for sex. Good old commitment issues haha. I don't really think I can give much advice on those matters I'm afraid. Just try not to hurt people, as I'm sure you do try, and do whatever feels best for you alongside that.

That would indeed make more sense, but I don't tend to credit you with the ability to use logic, so no - next years.

Way to bring about some clarity. I do understand the rest of that post, and you do make some good points, but that smiley really confuses me since it doesn't make any sense being there from what I can tell. All I wanted was for you to explain why it was there because I was clearly missing something, but oh well, it doesn't matter. You might just be going for next years smiley award.

That's not weird, don't worry. Move at the pace which best suits you. The worst thing you could possibly do is put yourself in a situation you don't want to be in. It's not weird, that's the natural route for yourself, and it is you who matters.

I don't understand the context in which it was used. I don't understand your smugness. Surely you used it for a reason, and therefore there surely is something to understand unless your smileys are simply sporadic and random. You don't have to elaborate, I just thought it would help me understand the post a bit more.

That wasn't my sentence, just so you know. I think you did know, I'm just making sure, so sorry if that sounds patronising. The best way would be for you to research it. Perhaps if you can buy a New Scientist from this week to explain things a little better. I have mine but I haven't read it yet as I've been busy. I'll try to explain it a little more conclusively when I have read it. I just stuck that on to spark debate, and then I was going to read up on it and add my opinion. I know exactly what you are saying though, and I share part of that view. I'll let you know more when I've read it, which should be tonight :)

:( Today I learned that wearing tracksters that don't fit me make me look like a sex offender.

I don't understand your first smiley.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/17/osama-bin-laden-guns-found-after-killing?CMP=twt_gu Osama bin Laden's guns found 'only after' US Navy Seals killed him • AP revelation fuels claims al-Qaida chief was illegally executed • New account sheds light on sequence of US raid in Abbottabad • Report comes amid news of clash between Nato and Pakistan After Bin Laden: US Senator John Kerry (left) meets Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister, during a meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan, on 17 May.

Drop out, start a revolution! It'll fail though.

That's not evil at all. It is partly a coping mechanism, but I think once you get older you don't necessarily need it the same (note the necessarily, as nobody knows what happens after death, we can only speculate - have to state the obvious here in case my words get twisted). It's too much to expect a child to understand eternal nothingness, something that to adults is almost inconceivable. And yes, the only way to make a study like that would be to deprive a child of much of what is normal for a child to grow up amongst.